Coffee and love
Outreach grows under Calgary bridge
Most Saturday mornings about 250 men and women experiencing homelessness line up under downtown Calgary’s 5th Avenue Flyover bridge for coffee, a hot dog, toothbrushes, clothing and personal items. It’s a low-profile mission and charity next door to the Calgary Drop-In & Rehab Centre led by local volunteers Jesse and Stephanie Singleton.
Jesse’s father was rescued from homelessness and addiction in 2010. He passed away five years later after a work accident. “When Dad passed away, I thought of how he’d been found outside a homeless shelter and that someone else’s dad still was down there,” says Jesse. “I decided to go there, hang out with people and start giving them a cup of coffee.”
An assistant manager at a lumber yard, the costs of his outreach grew and became difficult to manage. “I was buying boxes of Starbucks coffee. It was costing a couple of hundred dollars a week,” says Jesse.
Jesse purchased his own coffee roaster to help make the mission sustainable and began calling it Kingdom Coffee. Then he discovered Diego Chavarria, a fair-trade coffee farmer in Nicaragua who is a church planter of multiple congregations in Central America.
Jesse visited Chavarria in January 2019. “Just before the trip a friend blessed Kingdom Coffee with $10,000 to purchase coffee beans,” says Singleton. “We stayed on Diego’s plantation to see the inner workings. Over the week we built a friendship with Diego, his family and a number of employees.”
Kingdom Coffee became Canada’s first importer of Café Diego beans. In July 2019 Kingdom Outreach became a registered charity (www.KingdomCoffee.ca).
Jesse continued his under-thebridge outreach, but also began bagging and selling the roasted beans. In April 2020 the Singletons rented a storefront on Calgary’s industrial east side. It is now home to the roaster, bagging equipment, storage, one or two workers and seating for eight.
More donors pitched in, enabling the ministry to purchase a hot dog cart to add a quick, popular snack to the free coffee and other necessities their team hands out each week.
The storefront operation now operates as an actual retail outlet selling ten types of roast coffee. A portion of sales fund their street outreach.
“We share our coffee with people, hear their stories and let them know someone is listening,” says Jesse. “We believe God’s love can restore families, as it has restored ours.”
“We share our coffee with people, hear their stories and let them know someone is listening.”